


It Starts With Crayons

by itsfaberrytaboo (orphan_account)



Series: Color the Sky [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Age Play, Established Relationship, F/F, Natasha Needs a Hug, Non-Sexual Age Play
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-29
Updated: 2015-12-29
Packaged: 2018-05-10 07:25:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5576617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/itsfaberrytaboo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before she knows it, Natasha Romanoff has colored the sky, vast and kind of silvery-baby-blue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Starts With Crayons

**Author's Note:**

> Hopefully this will become a series of one-shots. More tags (and characters) will be added as the stories are. I hope you enjoy.

It starts with crayons.

They’re in Moscow, and Natasha has felt tense ever since the quinjet landed. She can’t help but look over her shoulder, which makes it hard for her to see what’s in front of her, and she curses when she bangs her knee against a chair. They litter the classrooms of the abandoned school she’s now in, little desks with their contents occasionally spilled out over the floor. This school hasn’t heard the pitter-patter of little feet in a long time, and there’s something too… innocent about it for Natasha to believe that the information given to the director was legit.

She’s not so sure this has ever been a Red Room.

There’s a chart on one of the far walls: several names with gold stars next to them, and one with a rather severe red frowny face. Natasha grins when she thinks that maybe she could’ve been that child with the dissatisfactory mark. Her grin fades when she remembers that she wouldn’t have made it out alive, if so.

Books are scattered here and there in front of her, their pages strewn open and revealing brightly-colored illustrations with sparse words in large type. One of the stories is of the tortoise and the hare; Natasha thinks it’s an odd choice for the Red Room. “Slow and steady wins the race” was not one of their mottos.

A sudden noise causes Natasha to whirl around with her gun at the ready; she sighs at herself when she realizes it was only a gust of wind from one of the broken windows causing a book to fall from its shelf. She takes a few seconds to calm the rapid beating of her heart, but she doesn’t let loose her grip on the gun.

Natasha Romanoff does not want to be here. She almost refused this op, but Cap had changed her mind. He’s worried about Bucky – they got word that somehow he might be here, too – and Steve is afraid he’ll be too distracted by his friend to handle his mission.

“I need you on this with me, Romanoff,” he’d said.

So here she is. Doesn’t mean she likes it. She _knows_ she’s not _that_ anymore. She knows she’s not that scared little girl afraid she’s going to get beaten for stealing an extra piece of bread. There are no handlers here in this little abandoned grade school, at least not anymore. And she’s not an assassin. At least, not anymore. But the air is thick with memories that Natasha _thinks_ are hers, and her whole body feels coiled and tight. She keeps reminding herself that they’ll be back at the jet soon, the op will be over, and she can breathe.

Until then, she approaches the teacher’s desk and opens one of the drawers with cautious fingers. There’s nothing, just as she expected; the Red Room is far too practiced at covering its tracks. She knows she wouldn’t find a book with names here, and the little boys’ and girls’ names that are written in the chart on the wall are probably just a distraction. The wrong scent on a trail that seems to go on forever.

She moves to shut the drawer, pausing when her knuckles knock against something tucked into the very back. Her body stiffens and she prepares herself for an explosion as she pulls it out slowly. It could be hooked to a timer and maybe the seconds are counting down now. Or maybe it could be the bomb itself and as soon as her hand creeps from the drawer, that will be the end of Natalia Alianovna Romanova.

Or… it could be a pack of sixteen crayons, harmless and innocent.

She laughs. It sounds harsh in the empty room; it’s void of humor because, after all, Natasha had been ready to die. But it’s nothing more than varying shades of color sticks, and though Natasha’s seen a lot in her time as a Black Widow and now as an Avenger, she’s pretty sure she can melt one of them with a glare faster than it could kill her.

She turns the box over in her hand, slowly. They’re not just crayons, they’re _glitter_ crayons, their points sharp and new as she pulls off the top of the box. They’re a little dusty though; she blows on them and smells cardboard and wax. They must have, Natasha thinks, been left behind in the haste. Which is a pity. So many lost pictures that could’ve been mounted on refrigerators or given to secret friends.

Feedback crackles in her ear, and Natasha winces a little.

“Romanoff, report.”

“Nothing, Cap.” She’s idly flipping the box-top on and off; there’s a light blue crayon in the middle, just perfect for coloring a sky.

“You know, I don’t think this is it. It’s too… _easy_ to be a Red Room.”

She’s not sure Steve will understand what she means. But this school is too messy, especially this room. The children who played and learned here couldn’t have been older than five or six, kindergarteners. The Red Room is too clean, too methodical. Too brutal for glittery crayons and fairy tales. This room was made for little boys in tennis shoes and girls in pinafores, not baby assassins memorizing how to wield a knife.

“One of the locals said the school just kind of trickled out,” Steve’s saying. He’s got his “Cap voice” out in full force, sure and strong.

Natasha pulls out one of the crayons, brushing her thumb over its paper wrap. It’d seem almost sacrilegious to use them, to wear them down to unusable nubs, even if that’s what they’ve been created for. The bright crayons are almost like a work of art themselves.

“A newer, better school got built a couple of miles over and I guess this one just couldn’t sustain itself.”

In other words, Natasha knows, the school is a dead end. She feels the restlessness of an op that is neither good nor bad begin to settle in her bones.

“I was hoping for a little more than that, I’m not gonna lie, Cap.”

“Yeah, me too.”

She picks up on the slight shift of his tone. “Did you—“

“No.”

“Sorry, Steve.”

“It is what it is. I guess we should pull out. Director’s going to be disappointed.”

She’s ready to move for the door but the weight in her right hand stops her. Natasha looks down at the box. She’s stuffing it in her backpack as she makes her way across the floor.

“She’ll get over it. Where you heading?”

“South extraction point. Maybe you should ask her out and make up for it.”

“Make up for it?” Natasha raises an eyebrow as she, carefully this time, wades through the overturned chairs and primary school debris. “What’d I do?”

“I mean, it’d help to ease the disappointment. Dinner, a movie…”

“Home by ten, walk her to the front door and kiss her good night, no going in for coffee?”

The noise of the street doesn’t dim Steve’s chuckle in her ear, once she’s outside in the light.

“You’d be a perfect gentleman, Romanoff.”

Now she rolls her eyes. The extraction point is less than a mile away; she moves steadily. The people in the street don’t notice her, or if they do, she’s gone out of their sight too quickly for them to even wonder if their own eyes are playing tricks on them.

“One, your forties sensibilities are adorable, and two, been there, done that.”

If she’s ever going to tell Captain America that she, Natasha Romanoff, former-assassin-turned-agent, is dating Director Maria Hill, well, she supposes wrapping up an op was the best time.

“ _What_? How did I not know this, where have I been?”

“Practicing your ice skating routine?”

“That’s just _rude_.”

She snorts, a bit of a grin playing about the corners of her mouth, as it tends to do whenever she thinks about the brunette commander. It’s only been a couple of months, and Natasha’s still in this stupid honeymoon phase where just thinking about Maria creates this particular flutter in her stomach. Something about Maria takes the edge off, makes the taut line of Natasha’s jaw go soft and her fingertips tingle. Maria is solid in a way that Natasha knows _she_ isn’t; it’s the difference between calmly wielding a gun and recklessly (but expertly) jumping off a shield onto the back of a Chitauri. She’s capable with her words, which is something Natasha utterly _fails_ at the first time she tries to ask Maria out. Luckily, that had sort of worked to her advantage.

_(“You’re trying to ask me out.”_

_“Uh… yeah?”_

_“I like that little Mexican place just down from the Tower. Their quesadillas are fantastic.”_

_“Quesa—yeah! I like quesadillas!”)_

Her handler at the Red Room would’ve been _so_ disappointed in her. And she does not give one tiny bit of a damn about that.

“I feel like you’ve broken some sort of code by hiding this all from me.”

His voice is still in her ear but now Steve is standing next to her, and for god’s sake he actually seems to be pouting.

“I didn’t hide anything from you,” she points out placatingly. “There’s nothing to tell, anyway. We’re having fun. It’s not serious.”

He’s giving her a suspicious look as they’re go for extraction point. “You’re dating Maria Hill,” he states the obvious.

“You’re the one who kept nagging me like an overbearing mother to ask her out!”

“I do not _nag_. And I never actually thought you’d go through with it.”

He pulls his helmet off as they come into a clearing, away from the bustle of town. His blonde hair is tousled even further when he runs a gloved hand through it, and for a minute to Natasha, he looks more like a ten-year-old than he does ninety-something-whatever.

“Shows what you know,” Natasha shouts at him over the new roar of the impending quinjet.

So the op is, for all intents and purposes, a bust. She debriefs, well, briefly, with Maria, Natasha sat in her quarters with Maria’s face projected onto the far right wall. She notices Maria ever-so-not-subtly scanning her for injuries, and the idea of it makes Natasha grin. Again. There’s little to no information to give, and Steve’s right, the Director _is_ disappointed, even though she reassures Natasha that they didn’t have much but rumor to go on anyway, so it’s nobody’s fault that they couldn’t find a Red Room when one wasn’t there to begin with.

This is something Natasha really likes about Maria. Where Natasha is all tense muscles and limbs, angry at herself for not being able to ferret out _some_ bit of information that could be useful, Maria is calm and full of praise. Natasha’s seen Maria’s wrath when something doesn’t go right, although luckily it hasn’t been directed at her – yet. But more often than not Maria apparently goes with what Steve calls the “sandwich approach”: compliment someone, yell at them, then compliment them again. Natasha hasn’t experienced the filling of that sandwich yet, and she’s not eager to.

But the compliments, the praise? That she likes, more than she thought she would.

And she likes the way Maria says “Night, Natasha,” and gives her that smile Natasha knows is for her, just before the comm is switched off.

It’s not serious, but it sure is nice.

Later that night when she’s out of her suit and into a pair of shorts and a tee-shirt, she finds the box of crayons that she’d stowed away in her bag. Natasha makes a soft noise of surprise as she pulls it out; she’d forgotten about it. She’s not relaxed, and she’d been going through her tac backpack to try to find the map they’d been given, the possible location of the Red Room.

Maybe they’ve missed something.

But the map is discarded on the bed as she regards the crayons in her hand. If she held them up to the light just right, it’s as if the colors glimmer and shine; she likes the way that looks. Life’s really never been about _pretty_ , for Natasha. If it is, it’s just to accomplish a mission, a way of making people’s heads turn and forget what they aren’t supposed to be telling her. Sure, there are pretty dresses and nice shoes, but they’re costumes. There’s not much appreciation for what Steve would probably call “the finer things in life.” Or the simpler ones. She’s never been much for simple.

But these crayons, as she holds them up to the light in their pristine cardboard box… are _pretty_.

Natasha stretches out on her stomach on the bed, her chin leaning against her arm. She rolls her finger over the crayons, still tucked inside the green and yellow trapping. There’s red, which she likes. That sort of sky blue, which she loves. Grey and orange and even the white is glitter. Her back hurts, she realizes suddenly. She feels like she’s been holding in a breath for too long, and for a brief moment she closes her eyes and tries to push all of the tension out through her fingers and toes. Natasha stresses each muscle almost to the point of pain, but there’s not really a release when she lets go.

She’s always so tightly wound, like a jack in the box not opened yet.

She surprises herself when she unceremoniously dumps the crayons from the box onto the bed. The sky-blue one nearly escapes and she snatches it back up, holding it in the fist of her hand and looking at it. The index finger of her other hand presses into the crayon’s point, dulling it slightly, and she frowns.

Well, now it’s just messed up. It’s not straight and perfect and uniform, like the others.

Natasha shifts on the bed, yawning, and thinks she ought to go to sleep. She’s unconsciously moved on top of the map and she grunts, pulling it out from under herself. She’s mad because she didn’t get any information and she’s really too tired to study the harsh black lines of avenues and streets, so she flips the map over to its blank side and thumps it down onto the clipboard she’d also pulled from her tac bag.

She’ll look at it tomorrow, when she’s slept a few fitful hours and has new eyes for the details.  Meanwhile she realizes that the blue crayon is still in her hand. She glances at it, at the way the once-sharp tip was now slightly smudged in a downward angle from her pressing finger. The blue glitter is nice as-is but it’s not meant to stay molded into a stiff three-inch stick forever. She may not have ever had crayons growing up but Natasha is pretty sure that isn’t how it was meant to work.

She stares at the crayon in her hand, then looks over at the map. Natasha rolls her eyes at herself, starts to gather up the crayons to put them back into the box, then hesitates. She picks up the blue again, and reaches out.

It streaks in one unsteady pale line across the white paper. Natasha stretches her neck this way and that, trying to work some of the tension out of her shoulders. She tilts the crayon in her hand, and tries again. Now the color rubs over the top of the paper, little waxy and glittery bits sticking out as it darkens.

Before she knows it, Natasha Romanoff has colored the sky, vast and kind of silvery-baby-blue. Moscow was rainy today, spotted with some sunlight here and there, but not nearly enough. From what Natasha thinks she can remember, Russian skies never seemed to be that cheerful. She likes this sky a lot better.

She puts the blue crayon down, reluctantly, to pick up the tan-colored one. Mountains, Natasha decides. Big, imposing mountains stretching as far as they can. She’s not an artist by any means; the mountains are literally just awkward triangles that don’t really represent the image in her head of snow-capped peaks that rise high above a peaceful, bubbling creek. A different blue paints water in jagged lines, followed by the curved black m’s of birds, flying somewhere and not even needing a quinjet to do it.

Her body is flush into the bed, smooth and easy; her legs are lifted up and her ankles crossed. She’s concentrating so hard on the picture in her head and the colors on the paper that Natasha doesn’t realize she’s actually relaxing. There’s nothing else in the room but her and the _scritch-scratch_ sound the crayons make as she draws and colors, sometimes staying in the rigid lines and sometimes straying just beyond.

An hour has gone by before she even thinks to notice. Natasha lays on her bed staring a little stunned at the picture she has made. She’s ruined the map, because no way can she bring it with her anywhere or into any meeting that she knows Steve will probably want in the morning. As a matter of fact, there’s nowhere she can bring this, anywhere, so... best to just throw it away.

Still, she chews at her lower lip because she drew this. It’s bad, she knows; seduction is her art, really. But this is a picture of something that Natasha is pretty sure she wants. Mountains and quiet, no ops or quinjets or Red Rooms. And she’s absurdly proud of this picture that she has colored. She doesn’t know why, there are no refrigerators anyone will dare to pin it on, no secret friend she’ll give it to. But still she signs her name at the bottom, broad black letters like you’d find in a fairy tale book on the floor of an abandoned school.

Natasha puts the now-imperfect crayons back into their box with careful fingers, moves off the bed to slip the map-picture into a notebook after sneaking one last glance at the triangle mountains. The crayons go into her bag and Natasha climbs back into bed.

One hand pillows her cheek and she’s stroking her thumb over her skin. Her body stretches out, lithe and light, like a cat, and in a few minutes her eyes are closing and she’s letting a little smile cross over her lips as she thinks of Maria’s face, colored on her wall.

Natasha sleeps through the night, and into the morning.


End file.
